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0 pointsvaluearb8y ago0 comments

i) 747 sales were already declining and it required expensive investment to continue. ii) How would A380 sales help sell other Airbus aircraft? It's such a low volume plane that it offers virtually zero benefits to purchasing other Airbus models.

200 deliveries for a $30B+ development costs is a disaster. Airbus has already admitted the development costs will never be recouped, they'd have to sell over 400 planes to ever have a shot.

And any technology you want to develop for other planes would have been far cheaper to just develop for the other, presumably profitable, planes.

Boeings brilliance was sucking Airbus into this market. Instead of canceling the 747, they kept the 747 production line open with a low cost update (the 747-8) allowed them to crater A380 pricing. That cost Airbus a huge amount of capital, and delayed/hamstrung their efforts to compete with the 777 and 787.

Airbus has lost at least 10x as much on the A380 as Boeing lost on the 747 since 2000.

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notahacker8y ago· 2 in thread

Nobody is saying Airbus has made a profit on the A380, but absorbing development costs over 250 aircraft delivered leads to much lower losses than absorbing them over 14 aircraft delivered like a certain innovative indirect ancestor of Airbus...

And much as program costs are accounting fiction, Boeing's written down far more than a 10th of the A380 program costs as 747-8 development programme specific losses, never mind the bigger issue of losing a natural monopoly cash cow - even a declining one - and the tag of being the undisputed best at large widebodies which has wider ramifications. Not sure the 747-8 was ever really a significant factor in A380 pricing, because Emirates were even less likely to buy something only fit for freighters as their flagship passenger aircraft than they were to take any notice of what the actual sticker price for the A380 was when negotiating deals.

It's an open question whether the A350 would have done much better if Airbus had doubled down on launching at the same time as the 787, or whether it will do better in the long run for being the more recent aircraft model for its first couple of generations.

valuearbOP8y ago

Airbus isn't absorbing development costs over 250 aircraft at all, those aircraft are barely going to be profitable on their own construction costs, let alone chip away at the $30B+ developmental costs.

The 747-8 cost only $2.5B to develop. The accounting fiction is Airbus's attempt to minimize how much it actually spent on A380 development. The sole ramification of being the undisputed leader in large wide bodies is apparently limited to massive capital losses.

Gibbon18y ago

What boggles me a bit about the A380 vs the 747 is the 747 development was a bit of an accident based on 1960's era irrational exuberance. At the same time they were working on that they were trying to develop an SST. The SST was supposed to be the future of passenger aircraft. It failed and the 747's succeeded. And managed to side line some smaller competitors like the DC10.

But since it went into service no one built a comparable or larger aircraft for 30 years. And if there was a huge untapped market for super large passenger jets, why weren't more 747's in service?

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